The Fortunes of Oliver Horn | Page 6

most marvellous of all discoveries of modern times--his new
galvanic motor.
If it were your first visit, and he had touched in you some sympathetic
chord, he would have uncovered a nondescript combination of glass
jars, horse-shoe magnets, and copper wires which lay in a curious
shaped box beneath one of the windows, and in a voice trembling with
emotion as he spoke, he would have explained to you the value of this
or that lever, and its necessary relation to this new invention of his
which was so soon to revolutionize the motive power of the world. Or
he would perhaps have talked to you as he did to me, of his theories
and beliefs and of what he felt sure the future would bring forth.
"The days of steam-power are already numbered. I may not live to see
it, but you will. This new force is almost within my grasp. I know
people laugh, but so they have always done. All inventors who have
benefited mankind have first been received with ridicule. I can expect
no better treatment. But I have no fear of the result. The steady
destruction of our forests and the eating up of our coal-fields must
throw us back on chemistry for our working power. There is only one
solution of this problem--it lies in the employment of a force which this
machine will compel to our uses. I have not perfected the apparatus yet,
as you see, but it is only a question of time. To- morrow, perhaps, or
next week, or next year--but it will surely come. See what Charles
Bright and this Mr. Cyrus Field are accomplishing. If it astonishes you
to realize that we will soon talk to each other across the ocean, why
should the supplanting of steam by a new energy seem so extraordinary?
The problems which they have worked out along the lines of electricity,
I am trying to work out along the lines of galvanism. Both will
ultimately benefit the human race.
And while he talked you would have listened with your eyes and ears
wide open, and your heart too, and believed every word he said, no
matter how practical you might have been or how unwilling at first to
be convinced.

On another day perhaps you might have chanced to knock at his door
when some serious complication had vexed him--a day when the cogs
and pulleys upon which he had depended for certain demonstration had
become so tangled up in his busy brain that he had thoughts for nothing
else. Then, had he pushed pack his green door to receive you, his
greeting might have been as cordial and his welcome as hearty, but
before long you would have found his eyes gazing into vacancy, or he
would have stopped half-way in an answer to your question, his
thoughts far away. Had you loved him you would then have closed the
green door behind you and left him alone. Had you remained you
would, perhaps, have seen him spring from his seat and pick up from
his work-bench some unfinished fragment. This he would have plunged
into the smouldering embers of his forge and, entirely forgetful of your
presence, would have seized the handle of the bellows, his eyes intent
on the blaze, his lips muttering broken sentences. At these moments, as
he would peer into the curling smoke, one thin hand upraised, the long
calico gown wrinkling about his spare body, the paper cap on his head,
he would have looked like some alchemist of old, or weird
necromancer weaving a mystic spell. Sometimes, as you watched his
face, with the glow of the coals lighting up his earnest eyes, there
would have flashed across his troubled features, as heat lightning
illumines a cloud, some sudden brightness from within followed by a
quick smile of triumph. The rebellious fragment had been mastered.
For the hundredth time the great motor was a success!
And yet, had this very pin or crank or cog, on which he had set such
store, refused the next hour or day or week to do its work, no trace of
his disappointment would have been found in his face or speech. His
faith was always supreme; his belief in his ideals unshaken. If the pin
or crank would not answer, the lever or pulley would. It was the
"adjustment" that was at fault, not the principle. And so the dear old
man would work on, week after week, only to abandon his results again,
and with equal cheerfulness and enthusiasm to begin upon another
appliance totally unlike any other he had tried before. "It was only a
mile-stone," he would say; "every one that I pass brings me so much
nearer the end."

If you had been only a stranger--some